today is the 10 year anniversary of my album called "super pony world", which was retroactively appended the subtitle "zräos simulation" to distinguish it from its sequel, super pony world: fairytails.
today i also learned that my childhood cat, miso, has passed away.
cover art (left) by @strflr - miso, the cat (right)
i had released other albums before super pony world, but it's the one i consider to be my actual first real album, and everything before was just me practicing to get to this point.
super pony world was an album about escapism, feeling isolated and disconnected from the people around me—my friends, my family, my peers—and trying to invent a world where i felt like i belonged. it entails the story of vylet featherdance and their little hologram companion, rayna, adventuring together through that world.
miso was my companion through my childhood in daly city. no matter who i did or didn't get along with, i always came back to him and he came back to me.
i named him miso because he was like miso soup to me. i think he preferred me, as he spent the most time with me out of everyone in the house and when he was most leisurely he would find his way to my room. he had a tendency to understand our words to a degree, in nuanced ways. my favourite story is how i needed him out of my room so i could do some recording, and so i verbally said "miso can you leave please." i didn't make him do anything or carry him out; he understood what i was saying and he hopped off my bed and made this weird, almost sarcastic series of chirps and grumbles as he left my room, like he was pissed off at me about it.
it occurs to me a lot of people don't know about what happened in 2019 to me. it was a very big deal then, but isn't something i talk about very much. 7 years ago i came out to my family, and through a convoluted series of events, it led me to being kicked out and isolated from them. strangely, this was at the point when i was beginning to draft the sequel to super pony world, fairytails, and there's a deep irony about the themes of loneliness and familial disconnection coming into a cruel fruition.
i haven't seen miso since 2019. there have been opportunities to ask about him, but things had already been kept from me that i assumed maybe he had already gone at some point. but i found out today that he had only just gone.
i don't really know what he could've thought when i suddenly disappeared. i wonder if he missed me, or if he would have remembered me, in his old age, had i returned at the end.
both super pony world and miso were anchors at a time of my life where i was stuck and afraid of change. lots of things were changing around me, but not me. then change came for me, and i have been changing since. now the anchors i wish they had seen me through to this point of my life where i'm constantly shapeshifting. i just wonder about it.
well, miso has hijacked my anniversary for this album. it was never intended to be for him or to be an allegory for his constancy in my childhood. but it is to me now that he was always being that cornerstone, grounding me in a way whenever i felt far apart from everyone else.
this was the last photo i took of him, before i left.
i love you. i miss your whiskers because they were so long and reminded me of a fish. i miss how you would rub your face so hard against me that i could feel your teeth. i miss the way you would nest behind my desk and make it impossible for me to work because i was scared you were going to electrocute yourself on the wires. i miss you like i miss home, both one of one transient but perfect thread through my heart. i miss how you would let me faintly brush the very tips of your ears which would make you twitch them annoyingly at me because that was just me annoying you but it was also fair to get back at you for nesting behind my desk. when i met you and for as long as we lived together we were both indoors cats we didnt want to go outside we liked being inside. i wish you could see me now that im not like that. i like going to the sun and to the river and trees now miso im someone new but im still the same person who loved you and loved you. im sorry i didnt go home i couldnt go home but i wanted to see you again so much. i never forgot you i've thought about you so much when i had to go i love you. i hope you didnt think i wanted to be away from you because i would have taken you with me if i could have and maybe if i did you would've made sure i wasn't as messy an eater or as careless an organizer as i am now. maybe you changed just as much as i did, but it's hard to say; because even if you did, you would've been smug and hiding about it. i dont know where else to tell you this maybe you're an angel in my files and you can read every confession and memory like rayna. but i hope somehow you knew everything i'm saying without me having to say it anyway. i hope people remember you with me somehow.
happy anniversary to super pony world, an album which could have only ever existed as a conception of my childhood. it was because i wasn't good enough and i was too naive that i made that album, and i can never get back to that version of myself to create something like it again. you'll forever share this day with miso, and i think that's fitting.
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